Saturday, September 8. 2007

I recently added some stuff to gentoo for openstreetmap and gps-related work.

For one, the java openstreetmap editor josm now has ebuilds. josm and josm-plugins, the first only installs the program itself plus language packs, the second installs most of the josm-plugins available. They can be enabled within the configuration.
I was a bit unsure how to handle it, as I first thought about adding some basic plugins to the josm-package itself. But as the opinions on what »basic« plugins are seem to differ a lot, I decided to do it this way.
Another new package is gebabbel, a gui-frontend for gpsbabel. gpsbabel is a commandline-tool that implements various proprietary gps coordinate formats and allows access to many gps-devices (e. g. garmin). Beside it can be used to filter and convert gps-tracks.

More to come. Probably also interesting stuff in portage is gpsdrive (which has some osm-stuff in svn, but not yet in a release), marble (world-view-tool for kde, osm-support is planned within the next months). Other stuff not yet in portage, I plan to make packages in the future: tiles@home, qlandkarte, mapnik and probably everything it takes to run an osm-server.

A bit offtopic, as gentoo doesn't run on mobiles (yet): Mobile Trail Explorer is the only free (as in freedom) software I found for J2ME-mobiles to create gps-tracks. It's a bit alpha, lacking some features and unstable, but it's free, so I hope it'll become better soon. It's a cheap way to get gps-tracks, assuming that you already have a java/bluetooth-mobile and you can get a gps-mouse starting at about 50 €.

If you have more suggestions for gps/osm-related stuff, feel free to open requests on the gentoo bugzilla and add me to the cc.